Movie Review: McCabe & Mrs. Miller - Page 2

As the myth of McCabe the gunfighter starts spreading, he starts to promote a new enterprise, a prostitution camp. Attracted to the new endeavor, Mrs. Constance Miller (Julie Christie), an opium-addicted madam, arrives in town. Mrs. Miller is the only one to see through McCabe's phony facade to the hard-drinking, charming con-man hidden beneath. She bids to go into business with McCabe to turn the camp into a luxurious brothel. The establishment of the brothel, and the church, accelerates the town's development, bringing both the God-fearing and the corrupt together to form a community.

Soon, the Harrison Shaugnessy Company, in the form of a man named Sears (Michael Murphy), comes calling on McCabe to buy his business. McCabe's response? "Well, Sears, I'm Roebuck. Who'd you leave minding the goddamn store?" McCabe's folksy humor falls on deaf ears, as does his haggling for a greater bid when Sears shows interest in buying McCabe out. Sears leaves, and his company sends out three hired gunmen, a British giant named Butler (Hugh Millais), a kid, and an Indian half-breed, to kill the brothel owner. When Sheehan tells Butler how McCabe is really the outlaw "Pudgy" McCabe, Butler says, "That man never killed anyone in his life." But as he trudges through the snow, hunted by the gunmen, McCabe has an ace up his sleeve that brings that denial into question — a Deringer pistol.

Altman spends the first hour of the film setting up the house of cards upon which McCabe, and Presbyterian Church, is built. The legend of McCabe is given a lot of credence in the iconic style used to shoot his entry into town. Vilmos Zsigmond's then innovative soft focus cinematography creates a warm, nostalgic, almost historic mood. The haunting Cohen folk songs, heard throughout, serve the same mystical function as a Greek chorus, commenting on the tale and enhancing its archetypal relevance to traditional myths. The silence McCabe adopts when interrogated about Bill Roundtree plays into our expectations of western outlaws and their stoicism when referring to killing.

But once Sears and his company appear, the film shifts into a second hour where Altman explodes the western myth. The outlaw hero, McCabe, is visibly shaken by the quiet departure of Sears. The sun-dappled greenery of the northwest turns into a bleak snowy landscape. When questioned about a gun he carries, an innocent young cowboy (Keith Carradine) explains how he wears it mostly for show, and doesn't know how to shoot it. Goaded into unholstering the gun by one of the hired guns, he is brutally murdered while atop a bridge, falling into icy water, and demolishing the cliche of the honorable gunfight on a dusty street.

Article Author: Tony Dayoub

Tony Dayoub is a screenwriter and film critic whose reviews can be found at Cinema Viewfinder, one of the top 100 film blogs according to Technorati. He recently covered the 47th New York Film Festival. Coverage of the festival and current releases can be found at Cinema Viewfinder. …

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